Democracy deficit at Americans Elect?

The new group Americans Elect is trying to ease the path for an independent presidential candidate chosen by voters in a national Internet primary to appear on the election ballot in all 50 states. This is a tall order — achieving national ballot access for a third-party candidate to run against President Barack Obama and the Republican nominee is complicated and expensive.

Enthusiasm for this group is growing. But it could be misplaced. Tom Friedman said in The New York Times that Americans Elect will do to the two-party duopoly “what Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music [and] what drugstore.com did to pharmacies.” Perhaps.

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Rather than gush about this group, I fear many aspects of it: its secrecy; the uncertain security for its Internet election and, most important, the lack of democracy in its system for electing a presidential nominee.

While it is providing voters a path to choose a presidential ticket through the democratizing force of the Internet, the process can, in fact, be overruled by a small board of directors, who organized the group. This board is to have unfettered discretion in picking a committee that can boot the presidential ticket chosen by voters if it is not sufficiently “centrist” and even dump the committee if it doesn’t like the direction it’s heading.

Campaign finance reformers have already condemned Americans Elect for switching its organizational status under the Tax Code from political organization to 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. This change allows an organization to shield its donors. The group, which says it has raised $22 million of its $30 million goal, insists that it doesn’t have to be registered as a political organization, with publicly disclosed donors, because it is not a political party. Americans Elect cites a court opinion, which ruled that a similar group in the last election, Unity08, did not have to register with the Federal Election Commission as a political organization because it was set up to achieve ballot access, not to pick a particular candidate.

But Americans Elect is doing more than simply paving the way for ballot access for the candidate who wins its Internet plebiscite. It has put rules in place to give an unelected committee within the group the right to veto a ticket that is not “balanced.” One of the group’s leaders, Elliot Ackerman, told T he Christian Science Monitor that the committee will allow only a “centrist” candidate to be chosen. Though it tries to skirt the language of “political party,” Americans Elect must qualify itself as a political party under state law in order to gain ballot access in states like California. So it sure looks like a political party supporting a future candidate of its choosing.

Nor has the group offered a compelling reason for failing to disclose the identity of its donors. Kahlil Byrd, the president of Americans Elect, told NPR that the group does not disclose donors because they fear retribution. Yet aside from some questionable accusations of harassment raised by donors to anti-gay rights causes, there is virtually no evidence that contributors to candidates or parties face harassment these days because of their contributions. Who is going to throw a Molotov cocktail through the window of a radical centrist?